The Bush

by Don Watson

  It was bad enough for Taylor to insist that the inland of Australia was useless and would never support extensive white settlement; what was worse, he believed much of it should be given over to non-white settlement. To populist believers in Australia Unlimited (E. J. Brady, Ernestine Hill and Ion Idriess, for example) the idea of leaving the inland empty was near enough to treasonous. It was defeatist talk. How dare a scientist call the centre of Australia arid! In Western Australia the government banned his work from school reading lists. Taylor also offended by ridiculing the popular view that the country could support 100 million or more people. Twenty million by 2000, he said, and he was right. He was right about many things, but his idea that the bush could not be home to millions of industrious farmers and their families, that it could not define Australian life as it defined the Australian self-image, took a century to swallow.

  By the middle of the nineteenth century much of the mighty bush had become a sheepwalk. Sheep had descended on the land like the Babylonian army, routing everything before them in a cloud of dust. They multiplied prodigiously as they went: 500 ewes could become 900 sheep in a reasonable year. The future of the colony lay in ‘pasturage rather than tillage’, said Commissioner Bigge in 1821, and in fulfilment of that prophecy the land was taken up not by any means resembling orderly colonisation, but in a rapacious frenzy. Granted security of tenure on generous terms in 1847, the pastoralists’ grip on the land tightened. Such great owners of sheep as William Charles Wentworth I had begun to think their economic ascendancy ought to find more general and permanent expression in a colonial aristocracy, complete with a hereditary colonial peerage.

  As the goldrushes petered out, diggers sought an alternative to wage labour, and the middle classes flexed their political muscles. Both looked to the land. The Land Question, the question of who would own the bush, marched in time with the political question, the question of who would rule. In Melbourne in 1858 both questions were at least tentatively answered when some of the landless gathered to protest after the squatter-dominated Legislative Council rejected a bill to correct the land monopoly: the government swore in a thousand special constables and trained field guns on Princes Bridge.

  And yet the people of New South Wales, said the radical Dan Deniehy, ‘were to have an Upper House and a Constitution cast upon us, upon a pattern which should suit the taste and propriety of political oligarchs who treated the people at large as if they were cattle to be bought and sold in the market’. He likened the prospect of such a ‘bunyip aristocracy’ to other ‘degenerated’ Antipodean contrarieties, such as the duck-billed platypus. His satire skewered Wentworth, and ‘bunyip aristocrats’ became a lasting epithet for any would-be Australian gentry. It has been said of some of these radicals, middle-class city people in the main, that they were keen to unlock the land not so much because they saw the potential in the country and the landless, but because in any measure that weakened the squatters and the pastoral companies they sniffed a chance to satisfy their own claims to power. Always steadfast opponents of the pastoral interest, their enthusiasm for a bush yeomanry also grew as the industrial working class grew, and the labour movement developed with alarming speed into a serious political rival.

  Yet it was more than political convenience. Everything – the Bible, the classics, Locke and Rousseau, the paintings of Turner and Constable, the agrarian romance – told them that the just and moral basis for the future of the colonies depended on a just and moral answer to the land question. As Stuart McIntyre wrote, ‘In the colonies, where nature had still to be appropriated . . . the very process of colonization took on vernal associations of growth and renewal.’ The philosophy had it that by putting hard-working men on the land, the democratic Land Acts could slow an ‘unhealthy’ urbanising tendency and disaggregate equally unhealthy proletarian mobs before they formed. By making land available to everyone who wanted it, a productive, loyal and morally upright yeoman class would be created, and serve as an invaluable counterweight to both the pastoral nabobs and the organised working class.

  In the colonial Assemblies, members echoed what one historian called a ‘deeply rooted levelling cry’ to unlock the lands and let in a new generation of men no less industrious than the squatters had been in their prime, and with no less right to the country; men no longer with a realistic chance of sharing the bounty of the goldfields, but full of hope that with a bit of bush they might enjoy life’s promise. They would be no one’s servant or employee; there would be no demeaning work queues in overpopulated cities or wandering the countryside in search of work, food and shelter, no labouring for absentee rural proprietors whose wealth and power were based on nothing more honourable than a land grab. With the land unlocked – and, with it, countless striving souls – the bush would be midwife to generations of masterless, self-sufficient men, living as God intended with their wives and crops and herds. Both land and people would be improved and the ‘growth, the harmony and future greatness of the nation’ would be assured.

  The squattocracy did not buy the argument. They gave up their plans for a House of Lords, but still managed to shore up their interests in less than perfectly democratic Legislative Assemblies and in Legislative Councils either nominated or elected solely by men of substantial property. The Selection Acts created an unholy frenzy from which sharks and speculators made great profits, and by various means – outrageous trickery included – squatters often walked away with freehold title to the best portions of their runs. They had not established a paradise for man and fine Merinos so they might be dispossessed by chaps who fancied milking cows and growing peas.

  Not that self-interest was the whole basis for the squatters’ objections. They were defending the social tranquillity and distinction that their interests bestowed on the colonies. Were they not the men who had risked everything to make the land profitable and fit for civilised humanity? It was their (largely borrowed) capital and their enterprise that had pushed the frontier out, multiplied the flocks, and bred up sheep hardier, heavier and finer in the fleece. They had put the colonies on the sheep’s back, they and the great pastoral and mining companies, that is, and the cheap convict and Aboriginal labour of which they were availed, and powerless or acquiescent government. Where there had been a savage (or never less than untidy) wilderness the squatters had planted mansions, oaks, ashes, elders and palms, and traditions like croquet, tennis, hunting, balls, Scotch whisky and mulled wine: ‘society’, in other words. Whatever passed for taste and enlightenment was down to them. Christianity and British justice had followed their sheep.

  ‘Everything prospered’ in those days before the selectors and the sundowners, recalled Oscar de Satgé, that ‘fine fleur of the squatter type’. The Rugby-educated de Satgé was the second son of the first vicomte de Satgé de St Jean, and grandson of Cosme de Satgé, 12th baron de Thoren. In 1861 he and his partners took up runs at Peak Downs, and later at Coreena, further west. He developed Coreena with fences and bores and sold it for £70 000, investing the proceeds in 1.2 million hectares on the Leichhardt and Georgina rivers, a property called Carandotta. De Satgé grew wealthy for a while and represented the pastoral interest in the Queensland parliament, and as a member of the Queensland Pastoralists Protection League; then he lost pretty well everything except his happy memories of ‘the brisk, lightsome work’ of Queensland squatting in its early days. In 1882 he left Australia and retired to Folkstone in the land of his birth. He died there in 1906, leaving an estate worth just £443. Most likely it was Oscar’s brother, the 2nd vicomte de Theron, Ernest Valentine Leon – married to a daughter of Edwin Tooth, the merchant, pastoralist and brewer – who left the de Satgé name to a large family of Kalkadoon, some of whom were removed to Palm Island and whose descendants bear it still.

  Along with the squatters, industrious managers, teamsters, shearers, drovers and contractors also prospered. The flocks and herds of the great runs had fed the goldfields and cities. Where else on earth could a decent mutton forequ
arter be got for a shilling and sixpence, a leg for one and nine? The squatters had seen the bush in its magnificence, known it boundless, beautiful and alive with game, felt their hearts quicken at the sight, and knew what possessing it did to the soul’s dimensions. They were and are, one writer said in 1910, ‘the chief pillars of Australian prosperity, and the dominant types of Australian character’. They were city society’s essential stuff, and in the country they formed dashing gentlemanly ‘mobs’ around their superior bloodlines and taste for hard drinking, hard partying and hard riding, including to hounds. Agriculture was so mean, in comparison.

  Under the first of the Selection Acts, Premier John Robertson’s in New South Wales in 1861, a 320-acre lot of unsurveyed Crown land could be purchased at a pound an acre. A deposit of 5 shillings an acre was sufficient to secure the land, with the balance to be paid within three years. Thus was much of the colony’s good land made freehold private property and much of it the property of the old squatters. After 37 million acres (150 000 square kilometres) of New South Wales had been alienated from the Crown, over half of it was owned by just 677 people.

  Each colony passed its own Selection Acts and amended them as experience dictated. In every case there were spectacular failures, yet also enough success to sustain the agrarian faith and deliver up new schemes for closer settlement and ‘rural development’. In South Australia, land was sold (on credit) south of the so-called Goyder’s Line of Rainfall. With good seasons most of the selectors did well. Somehow farmers and governments persuaded themselves that the good seasons were proof that ‘rain follows the plough’, and submitting to that tragic nonsense, and to pressure from intending farmers, in 1874 the government opened land to selection north of the line and all the way to the Northern Territory. In 1880 drought, wheat rust and locusts struck, and wind blew away the soil. Leaving their stone huts to crumble like medieval ruins in the blasting sun and sand, selectors north of the Goyder Line packed up and went south again.

  As new Acts changed the terms of occupation and increased the size of blocks, and selectors’ children grew old enough to labour, good farmers who had begun on good land and enjoyed good seasons managed to enlarge their holdings and not only survive, but prosper. Selectors on the Yorke Peninsula, for example, generally did well, by themselves and by the colony, and even when they failed, the closer settlement of lands prompted governments to extend roads and railway lines. ‘The mighty bush with iron rails was tethered to the world’, as Henry Lawson put it. Selection meant towns and communities, an enduring pattern of life. In South Australia it meant a wheat industry.

  In Queensland the agrarian conviction was especially strong and durable. For a century at least, liberal, Labor and (when the influence of men like de Satgé and Augustus Gregory had faded) conservative politicians alike were wedded to the idea that Queensland’s destiny lay not in industry or suburbia, but in a more ‘natural’ and ‘moral’ farming life to which that state was best suited and which best suited the state. Immigration Acts tied the belief in agriculture and the blessings of a yeomanry to the colony’s filial bonds by making land available to Britons of good health and character willing to uproot themselves and make the voyage. The Queensland strategy had the desired effect: in 1933 just a little over 6 per cent of the population were employed in factories.

  Throughout the colonies, an array of so-called rural development, group settlement, village settlement and closer settlement schemes came and went for many decades after the Selection Acts. Though failure was as common as success, and many of the farms have been through a dozen incarnations since their utopian birth, these enterprises did broadly define the pattern of occupation between the coast and the Great Dividing Range. Success was semaphored by order and a vague intimation of Kent – paddocks of pasture and crops, cypress rows, neat bungalows set in neat gardens and orchards and half ringed by sheds.

  In Miles Franklin’s novel My Brilliant Career, Dick Melvyn takes on land near Goulburn, New South Wales, one half of which is useless and the other half more than he is cut out to manage. He drinks. It was not possible for a selector to drink and succeed. Meanwhile his child, Sybylla, struggles with both the work and the dreariness of it. Most of the people in the area where Franklin set her novel failed. The land was ‘over-crowded, under-capitalised and drought afflicted’, wrote the historian Jill Roe. The 1890s depression came like a whirlwind and wiped them off the land. The story was repeated again and again, all over the country. It forced its way into literature and into the nation’s mind.

  Yet such failure is hard to see in the old selection districts now. Those farms the bush did not reclaim were tacked onto others; their buildings fell down and were burnt or bulldozed away. Many selections survived in various forms through half a dozen incarnations and might now be hobby farms for horse enthusiasts, or bush-ringed slopes planted out with pinot noir or blueberries. Some have been subdivided and buried under suburbs and shopping malls. The selector’s hut by ringbarked trees is overgrown with blackberries, or lies beneath the four-bathroom, 50-square, faux-colonial residence of a couple of consultants working from home and desiring a view of eucalypts, the sound of magpies, and eggs from their own hens. In the way of all dreams, the agrarian dream is protean and cannot be regulated forever.

  It was called selection, but luck often decided the matter. Men ‘selected’ their land, but frequently did so not knowing if the creeks ran all year round or just in winter, if the soils that seemed fertile on one slope were thin and deficient on another, if what seemed good country in the season they first saw it turned out to be poor country thereafter, or if, when they had cleared the bush, the soil would fly away. They did not know that the rabbits were coming. Often they did not know these things any more than they knew if their cows would die of blackleg, their horses founder, or the pleuro would do for their ewes. And even if their first few years went well enough, they did not know if their bodies and minds would stand up to the work, the frustrations, loneliness and stress.

  So a great many selectors walked away from their useless half-cleared blocks, which in a twinkling ‘went back’ to bush, modified by weeds and erosion. As the bush went back to itself, failed selectors went back to their former states: wage-slaves, on other farms and in the towns. Some held onto their farms as best they could while working local and seasonal jobs. In the main, it is these ill-starred selectors that the literature commemorates and the country remembers. Australia’s Selection Acts have been in general judged a failure, especially when compared to the United States Homestead Acts, which over more than seven decades created around 1.6 million ‘yeoman’ farms on about 10 per cent of all US farmland, and in doing so provided an inexhaustible source of stories for novelists and screenwriters. In fact US homesteaders frequently failed, and for the same reasons that Australian selectors did: farms that were too small, soils that were too poor or too unstable once the vegetation went, climates that were too savage. Or the distance to markets was too great and the markets too unreliable. Or the ranchers were too cunning and ruthless. Or the farmers were not competent. But a great many succeeded and in doing so established a resounding national theme of valiant effort and resilience.

  In many cases the Australian selectors did not fall much short of this. In every colony some made good: as grain growers on the Darling Downs where, despite the pastoralists’ near stranglehold on the best land, a thousand new farms were created; elsewhere in Queensland and in northern New South Wales with sugar cane; dairying in places along the coast from Brisbane to Melbourne and beyond; in the Victorian Mallee and on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula with wheat. And win or lose, their experience was woven into the nation’s heroic view of itself. It is true that the American agrarian legend speaks more eloquently of success than the Australian version, but that to some degree reflects other, non-agrarian realities. Australia had no Rodgers and Hammerstein. No Riverina! for their Oklahoma!

  On the morning of Anzac Day, the local people gathered in the m
ain street to pay their respects to the war dead. This was the west of Victoria’s Western District, in the federal electorate of Wannon, blue-ribbon Liberal Party and Malcolm Fraser’s old seat. Well back from the road and out of sight behind their English trees, many of the old squatters’ mansions are still standing; in much plainer view by the roadsides are the weatherboard bungalows of the soldier settlers. Rain had fallen and the grass was green. By their more rounded vowels and lack of a rising inflection, their knitwear and sports coats, the bluer bloods of the remnant bunyip aristocracy stood out from the social middle, and tracksuits and hoodies separated the lower rungs from all of them. On Anzac Day the local cup is run, and outside the hotel across the street some young folk dressed up in faux Ascot gear drank beer and watched us file into the hall.

  A thin bald man whose beard and pronounced stoop gave him the appearance of an old salt or hermit was in charge of proceedings. Word had it he was League of Rights, and his military career amounted to nothing more than six months’ compulsory national service in the 1950s. But this is enough for membership of the modern RSL. Indeed it is enough to be a policeman, and ambulance driver or a CFA volunteer. The man told us so when he addressed the gathering in the hall. His speech began as a recruitment drive. Then he called on us to join in singing the royal anthem, and accompanied by a lady at the piano on stage, those old enough to remember the words obliged. ‘Lead Kindly Light’ followed, and then we recited the Lord’s Prayer, and then the RSL man introduced a recently retired naval rating who had grown up in the district. After briefly describing his experience at sea, the guest speaker told the story of the submarines that in 1915 breached the Turkish defences in the Dardenelles. He told it in terms very similar to those of C. E. W. Bean in his history of the Great War. The locals listened dutifully. A lady sang a song to honour the fallen. Then we joined in ‘Abide with Me’, before a piper and drummer playing ‘MacCrimmon’s Lament’ walked down the centre aisle and out into the back kitchen, where we heard the pipes expire.